3.4 Trauma Informed Clients’ Rights

Clients’ Rights intersect with Trauma-Informed Care

It is important to recognize that Trauma-Informed Care & Clients’ Rights intersect and how we deal with them greatly affects those we work with.  When we look through the lens of client empowerment, we begin to understand how individuals are affected when they try to access health care services and are impacted by policies, organization cultures that greatly impact clients and the many challenges and barriers that are in place.

Often health care services and the approach of service providers seems to be at odds, so when we allow clients to have a voice to say how they are impacted by traumatic experiences it empowers them greatly.

When we look at this through the lens of how these challenges affect clients than we can start making changes so that services can be easier to access, and more effective.

There are many agencies such as CAMH who focus on client empowerment and have them involved in programs that can create and sustain their own patient councils and make long term changes.

Often we find programs and councils run by those who’ve accessed these services and become peer support.

Let’s look at what that can look like in the next video.

Trauma Informed and Human Rights Perspective

The social work profession has given little attention to trauma-informed practice principles, and in promoting human rights in all areas of social work practice.  These perspectives are related and incredibly meaningful.  Through ongoing work it is important to gain in-depth knowledge and practice, theory and research methods — the trauma-informed and human rights lenses complement this by helping social workers better understand the work they do.

By including clients’ rights we take into account the potential role of traumatic life events and development of individuals using service delivery systems.  We can then recognize the staggering prevalence of traumatic experiences in the histories of many clients. We change how we ask clients and ask “What happened to you?” rather than “What is wrong with you?”

Looking at being trauma-informed and human rights perspective is a game changer in so many ways.

Human Rights

Trauma Informed and Trauma Specific Services

Often trauma and human rights violations frequently go hand in hand, so we need to seek and explore the intersection of traumatic experiences with human rights violations, from local to global.

We are committed to promoting social and economic justice. A human rights perspective entails a focus on the need for social action for community change — a key part of the recovery process for trauma survivors.

Difference between Trauma-Informed Care vs Trauma-Informed Specific Services

There are many trauma facilities across Canada, using evidence-based treatment programs and services to give hope to survivors of abuse, illness, or injury and military, veterans, first responders or anyone who has suffered from trauma.

Changes are happening but we still need to focus on looking not only through the trauma lens but also the intersectionality of Clients’ human rights lens.